‘Easter is not an ending. Easter is a beginning’
The Rev. Mamie Broadhurst invites those in worship during the Sprunt Lectures to dwell in life’s ambiguity
LOUISVILLE — Union Presbyterian Seminary’s 115th Sprunt Lectures closed with worship on Wednesday, led by insightful storytelling by the Rev. Mamie Broadhurst.
“In the lectures by Dr. [Miguel] De La Torre, we have wrestled with hope and hopelessness,” said Broadhurst, pastor of University Presbyterian Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “If you’re like me, that wrestling match is far from over just because Sprunts are coming to a close.”
During both worship services, Broadhurst traced the events from Good Friday through to Easter morning. Easter “does not wait, and it does not ask us to wait,” she said. “It makes me wonder, in our uncertainty and in the chaos, whether we have misused the gift of Easter, allowing a thin veneer of hope to masquerade as hope itself.” The gift of Easter “is so big we did not know what to do with it, and so over time, we thinned it out. We made it pretty. We talked about it in ways we could explain. We did that so we could move forward. Otherwise, we would run away saying nothing,” as the three women who came to anoint Jesus did after hearing from the man they encounter in the tomb of the resurrected Christ.
Broadhurst told the story of sitting in the classroom of her favorite high school English teacher, Ms. Brown, after school. One day students were talking about “all the wrongful punishments we had received from our parents,” then batting around ideas for revenge. Their teacher offered a “diabolical” suggestion: She and her daughter, Stephanie, had been arguing about the girl’s lack of time practicing her piano. The mother laid down the law, and her daughter dutifully began playing her scales — with a twist. Each time she began a scale, she refused to play the last note.
“Ms. Brown thought she was going to lose her mind,” Broadhurst said. The mother would rush into the living room, playing that last note over and over to get a sense of resolution.
“The Easter story we have today is kind of like an unresolved scale,” Broadhurst said, singing a scale as she laid out the highlights. “The women go to the tomb. They wonder who will roll away the stone. … The man says, ‘Jesus has gone on to Galilee and they should go tell everyone else.’ They run away terrified and say nothing to anyone. They are afraid because … ti, ti, ti, that’s it,” leaving the unresolved story where it is in Mark’s Gospel. “Our English translation, ‘for they were afraid,’ — as endings go, that’s not much better. It bugged some people so much that they added on to Mark’s Gospel. It’s an attempt to bring us back to do,” she sang with a nod to “The Sound of Music.”
“I don’t think that’s what Mark wanted. I think he wanted to leave us in the tension, to leave us to keep looking for the ending, to stomp into the room and seek our own resolution, to act. Mark wants as much as anything for us to see the Easter story doesn’t have an ending. Easter is a beginning.”
No matter when it falls on the calendar, Easter always comes alongside Passover, the “festival celebrating God’s liberation of Israel. But that liberation story wasn’t finished at Passover.”
We know the Easter story isn’t over “because the journey to have God’s will done on Earth as it is in heaven is far from complete,” Broadhurst said. “We still live in a world where violence and injustice cycle through the news and through our lives on a more than regular basis, … a world where students can get picked up off the streets and sent to a detention center … without due process, but they can’t pick their bathrooms or their sports teams.”
“We live in a world of ongoing crucifixions. There are a lot of people in this world who cannot exit suffering and grief. That is not their option. They do indeed live in Holy Saturday.”
The empty tomb first seen by the women “was never meant to ignore the cross or to deny the cross,” Broadhurst said. “It was meant to defy the cross, and it invites us to do the same.” The resurrection “is the definition that things don’t have to be this way.”
“Those of us with the power to make change” — really, all of us — “have a choice to make. As we step out of the empty tomb, we who have the privilege to come into and out of the hardship of trauma can use the doorway that God made. We can leave. We can walk away. Hell, we can run. That’s our choice,” she said. “But we can also choose to use that door as an entryway.”
We can allow Easter to “provide the kind of hope that turns around and faces death, faces the cross — not one day in some unknown future, but right now,” she said. “We have to ask ourselves in a world that knows all too well how to re-enact the crucifixion, how will we live out the resurrection?”
“How will we enter into the longing of our neighbor? Whose resistance do we need to come along beside?” Broadhurst asked. “How will we act on the worst things in order to transform them, and keep doing so whether or not we are successful?”
“I can’t answer those questions for anyone but myself, and there are days when I struggle to even do that,” she said. “But what I know is that this unfinished account, this unresolved ending that is really a beginning, beckons us to join the story. It insists that we find a way to tell the story of Jesus, as the women surely did once their terror had subsided, that welcomes our confusion, our astonishment, because that proves we’re paying attention. It entreats us to ask our own questions and to write our own next steps. We must choose our own adventure, y’all. Jesus can’t do that for you.”
Mark “stops mid-sentence and hands the pen to us, and says, ‘How will you share the good news of Jesus Christ in word and in deed,’ and he waits there expectantly, ready to see what we will do,” Broadhurst said.
The glorious trumpets the we often hear at Easter “are not an end to a race well run,” she said. “They are a Reveille, playing to wake us up and start us out. They will help us keep pace again and again as we lose heart.”
We turn toward the tomb, she said, and we find it empty. We remember “that Jesus has gone ahead of us, so we know we are not alone, even if we are afraid, because Easter is not an ending. Easter is a beginning,” Broadhurst said, singing one last scale and leaving it at “ti.”
Read additional Presbyterian News Service reporting on the Sprunt Lectures here, here and here.
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